The Story of ‘The Book‘
Inception
27th December 1997: It was just after 4 o’clock in the morning and I had been hosting a Boxing Day party with my [then] wife. With most of the guests having left before midnight, just two other couples remained who, I recall, were our closest friends at the time. Despite the abundance of food and alcohol that had been consumed earlier, everyone left was mostly awake and comparatively sober, and for the past four hours we had been sat round the dining room table, putting the world to rights. Aided by the occasional round of coffee and the odd spliff, we talked about everything from religion, politics and war, to popular culture, discovery and scientific advance, and were now contemplating what the future could hold for our children given the current state of the world. For the most part, conversation through the morning had been surprisingly grownup and comments from all quarters were generally quite thoughtful. Of course discussion was punctuated by the odd crude or quirky comment for humorous effect but, generally speaking, I felt that this had been a really thought-provoking occasion (within the intellectual confines of an after-party gathering, of course).
A staunch atheist, for my part, I had been advocating that the rule of ‘logic’ (in all its subjective form) was ultimately responsible for everything that we experience in life. Throughout the stream of discussion that morning, I had approached each topic with the viewpoint that human reality was the result of logical consequence, and I firmly believed that, whilst we reaped the benefits of human intelligence today, we will ultimately become the unnecessary victims of our own greed (despite being a so-called ‘thinking species’). I asserted that there is certainly no ‘God’ to save us, yet we lived in a dangerous world where religious beliefs still hold influence in most ruling establishments (even in the West). Indeed, I contested that humanity could only ever recover from the catastrophic consequences of our collective greed when enough people finally realised (or cared) where we, as a species, were headed – and by then it will likely be too late.
Although we may not all have agreed on everything that morning, the atmosphere was friendly and constructive, and everyone made an interesting contribution. Now, at around 4am, I remember going upstairs to visit the bathroom, and check on our young daughter who was sleeping peacefully in her bedroom. I can’t describe the exact moment but at some point, before I had returned to my seat at the table, I had begun to formulate an idea for writing a book based around the various topics that we had so far discussed that morning. I thought, ‘…wouldn’t it be interesting to create an interactive book based around logic and reason to explain our waking world using, as a basic framework, the various subject matter that we’ve been talking about’. And so The Book was born.
Later that evening (once I had had the day to recover) I attempted to draw a mental ‘map’ of the many subjects that we discussed that morning as a way to envisage how I could incorporate them into a single book. This would eventually evolve into the ‘contents map’ that I have used as a base to link the current PDF version of The Book together.
The first four versions of the ‘contents map’ (created between 1997 to 2000)
Conscious & Unconscious Developments
One of the many interesting topics that we discussed that morning concerned the human mind and our collective perception of reality itself. I was especially fascinated in the science of sleep and, in particular, the study of dreams in which I had long been interested. It was the one arena of discussion that appeared to evade the scrutiny of scientific ‘logic’, but I was determined to further investigate the metaphysical aspects of dreaming. As a result, at the same time that I conceived of The Book, I also resolved to keep a dream diary and record every dream that I could remember.
Up until that point I had read a number of books on the subject, and I understood the clear distinction between the serious scientific study of dreams and the pseudo-scientific interpretations of them that could be found in the myriad of books that claimed to decipher the meanings of dreamed subjects and events. In truth, as dreaming is a truly personal experience, I long realised that their meanings are unique to a dreamer and cannot be reliably interpreted using generic symbolism alone. But I had also read about the curious meeting of dreaming minds, and heard anecdotes about people who could recall exactly the same dreams from their own perspectives. One particular story that had recently left an impression on me centred on three psychology students at Southampton University, each of whom had the ability to induce lucidity within their dreams. Once you gain awareness that you are dreaming, provided you can avoid waking up or slipping back into unconsciousness, not only can you assume complete control of the world around you, but it is entirely possible to communicate with other dreaming minds. In this instance, two of the three undergraduates successfully rendezvoused in their dreams under a designated tree in a nearby field, and were able to recount precise details of their shared experience.
I had no such talent, but nonetheless I ‘religiously’ recorded every dream that I could remember. Indeed the very first dream that I managed to remember and write down was some vague ‘junk dream’ about finding a lost tube of toothpaste! It was pretty unimpressive, but I soon began to gain quite a collection of dreams, many of which were really interesting, though some were also very personal. I kept this up for six years, at first writing all of my dreams down on a notepad that I kept beside my bed, in order to print them out later on my computer. I disciplined myself to write them down as soon as I woke up so as to record as much as possible before my memory of their detail faded. I would often wake up from a vivid dream in the very early hours, and scrawl it out over a page or two before I could get back to sleep. Sometimes I would not wake until the morning and have two, three, or even four dreams to remember and write down. I’ll admit it wasn’t the easiest habit to form. After a couple of years, I finally invested in a dictaphone, into which I would quietly recount my dreams whenever I woke up. Not only was this quicker, but I didn’t have to decipher my semi-conscious scrawl when I came to type it up later. Of course I did all this whilst simultaneously attempting to write The Book; the project that would ultimately take over my interests.
I continued to record my dreams until 2003, cataloguing them into years and sorting them into various categories. Over that time I made some fascinating discoveries. Although I only managed to achieve lucidity a handful of times during those six years (and then only briefly), I did discover some unusual patterns to my dreaming that I would never have known had I not kept a diary. Whilst I found that journeys on buses and boats were commonplace in my dreams, I also discovered that the Moon featured quite regularly (either prominently or as a minor feature). What I found particularly interesting was that this happened every fourteen to twenty-eight days — in line with lunar phases. Perhaps the most shocking discovery however happened in 2002 when I was playing back my old dreams from the dictaphone. By then I had started to become a bit lax in typing out and cataloguing my dreams and, with several full tapes to go through, I found myself listening to my description of dreams that were now over two years old. I stopped typing and sat in stunned silence as I listened to myself describing a dream that would give me goosebumps. In this dream I found myself walking, with my best friend, towards the block of residential flats where my grandparents lived. Suddenly, without warning, I witnessed a passenger plane crash into the block, and now people were jumping out of windows desperately trying to escape the burning building. By the time a second plane struck it, I was much closer and, with the sight of falling debris above me, I woke from the dream. Whenever I recorded my dreams in such a way, I always preceded them with the date, and what shocked me was that I had dreamt this on 11th September 2000 — exactly a year before America endured its deadliest act of religious terrorism.
Whether it was an unconscious revelation or purely coincidental, a few months after uncovering this dream on the tape, I gave up trying to record them altogether. My marriage had begun to break down, and my once diligent attempt to catalogue all of my dreams gave way to different priorities. Besides, I found that a number of my dreams during this difficult time of my life were quite upsetting, and revisiting them could be somewhat of a depressing experience. By now however, I had built up quite a large archive of dreams which had subsequently been printed onto A4 paper, organised into different subjects and placed in box files according to their year. It seems a bit obsessive now, looking back at it, but my idea was to eventually examine the content and timing of my dreams in more detail with a view to finding other fascinating anomalies within them. Of course, another incentive had been to train my dreaming mind to attain lucid awareness. Most lucid dreams come about following a ‘trigger point’ within an unconscious dream. This can be the realisation that the situation is too absurd to be real, or a repeating scenario that the dreamer recognises from a previous dream, and recording your dreams increases the likelihood of triggering lucidity.
Although my interest in dreams didn’t wane, my active participation in their study did, and as my separation took its toll, any resolve that I had to continue both investigating my dreams and writing The Book was significantly weakened. Indeed, whilst I appeared to completely lose sight of my ‘dreamed ambitions’ of the previous six years, I also found myself lacking any motivation to continue writing The Book. So began an eighteen-month hiatus which only ended when, by ‘chance’, I fell into the ideal job for recuperating after such an ordeal. For almost seven years I lived and worked on a small island retreat off Southern England, where I could relax on my days off and enjoy its natural beauty. The atmosphere here nurtured my creative instincts. Amongst other things, I found myself getting into astronomy and creating a 360° star map from the roof of a castle and, of course, I tentatively picked up The Book again, writing it now on my new laptop, either in the comfort of my cottage or in the peace of the surrounding woodlands.
Returning to the real world in 2011, I continued to write and research throughout the incumbent decade, dedicating a lot of my free time to finishing The Book. I achieved this aim on 29th February 2020; the second of (thus far) three dates that mark significant moments in its creation. That afternoon I finally put a full stop at the end of the last sentence of the final section of the ultimate chapter. Although the feeling of reaching this stage after so long was hugely rewarding, I knew that there was still an awful lot of work to do before I could present it in its ‘raw’ current form. Indeed, not only did it require a considerable amount of re-editing and updating, but I had to assign some sort of order to The Book if I intended to stitch it together as a coherent PDF file. Over the next three years, that’s what I did; creating, in the process, a ‘table of contents’ for each chapter, and working on the basic links between every section and their various reference points within this version of The Book.
Once I had completed all of the basic links within The Book, for the first time, I could see for myself a ‘skeleton’, if you like, of the fully interactive animated book that I had envisaged. Although it has no true ‘beginning’ or ‘end’ point, there clearly had to be an order in which I wrote it, and the ‘contents map’ with its chapters ‘swirling’ around a central image of an open book gives an indication of that order. I was thirty-four when I began writing The Book, expecting the project to be finished within a couple of years. As a result, the first six chapters were comparatively short and to the point. My amateurish attempt at writing a profound book of such magnitude exposed my inexperience in those early years—although I felt that my focus and writing style gradually improved as time passed. Whilst creating these early chapters, I also tried to convey the images in my mind that I perceived would complement the ‘narration’ I was writing and, as a result, I also wrote accompanying ‘animation scripts’ (which I have not yet added to this version). It turns out that these animation scripts were residue memories from something far deeper within my subconscious. Which brings me to the other reason why leap year day 2020 bears considerable significance.
The Dream
I find myself standing in an old 1930’s-style ‘sitting room’. I walk past a cloth-eaten easy chair on my right, across a threadbare Persian rug whose intricately woven patterns have long since worn down, towards the chimney breast of a wall that is covered in drab yellow wallpaper. Whilst unlit coals sit upon the tarnished grate of a modest fireplace before me, on the mantlepiece above it is a central clock, flanked by a china ornament and a small sepia-toned photograph in a silver frame. Complete with a corner lamp stand, at first the whole thing reminded me somewhat of the wartime family room depicted in a video by‘Queen’ for their hit single
Lit by the sunshine that streamed in from the world outside, the corridor was now far brighter, and seemed considerably shorter than before. From beneath the closed door to my left, rays of light now replaced the billowing black smoke. I reached forward and this time opened the door, which now led me out into a summer garden filled with the red, pink, and white blooms of carefully nurtured rose bushes that bordered a small lawn intersected by a stone path. As I began to stride across the path towards a wooden picket gate, I remember my first conscious words.
“It’s a dream!” I exclaimed, as I lifted my feet from the path beneath and began to soar upwards into the sky.I was flying ~ the first thing that many dreamers look to do when they realise that they are asleep. It was a truly exhilarating experience, yet it was tinged with caution. I didn’t want to wake up, nor did I want to lose consciousness altogether and fall back into a mindless slumber ~ both of which have happened to me before on the rare occasions that I achieved lucidity within my dreams. This, however, felt somehow different. I was now several hundred feet up in the air. I looked around. Climbing towards the layer of fluffy cumulus clouds above me, I could now see a landscape of rolling hills stretching out in all directions. On the horizon before me, a gently rising hillock gave way to an area of deciduous woodland, whilst below, and slightly behind me I could see the house from which I emerged. I now saw it as completely benign entity; just an old bungalow sat alone in the middle of a small garden, fenced off from the wildflower meadow that dominated the hill below. To the East, more rolling hills, but now I could make out a small town nestled in the valley in the distance. I turned my attention back to the bungalow behind me. I recognised this place, I’m sure I’d been here before, and I instinctively knew to head westwards.
Over another small hillock and it wasn’t long before I reached a strange wall that stretched north to south as far as the eye could see. It appeared to be ‘double-skinned’; that is to say; as I approached it, it resembled a residential brick wall; the kind that you would find at the entrance to a wealthy private estate. As I passed over, however, I could see a dry stone wall on the far side, following every contour of its more modern counterpart. This marked a boundary. Behind me a ‘dreamworld’ where unconscious thoughts meld together in the sleeping minds of passive dreamers, in front lay a somewhat wilder landscape where unkempt pastures gave way to rocky outcrops and windswept grasslands. I don’t know what it was but I could tell that this was not the place of ‘everyday dreams’.Yet I traversed the wall below without any trepidation whatsoever. Now I looked up. In the clear blue sky above, a bright white light, almost blinding, shone down, bathing the ground in its warmth. The Sun?
Now here’s the strange thing. Having studied the nature of lucid dreams, I knew that the light could be a dangerous place where novices shouldn’t venture. Indeed most people who achieve lucidity within their dreams are usually content with experiencing the sheer wonderment of it all. I mean, when you gain complete control over a dream, you are restricted only by your imagination – there is nothing you can’t do, and it can feel as real as anything in our waking world. So why delve deeper? According to a number of eastern and shamanic traditions, the light can trap an unprepared mind; causing some dreamers who venture into it to confuse reality and endure years of waking madness. I however had no such qualms. I didn’t care because I felt I had nothing more to lose. So what if I lost my mind? I had just lost my family.
“Hang on a minute! That was in 2003 – almost twenty years ago!”
As I headed inexorably towards the light, I stumbled into a feeling of deeper awareness. I had dreamed this dream before (many times), and now my emotions, all those years ago when I first came here, had resurfaced. I was far more content with my life now than I was back then (after all I’ve lived happily with my wonderful girlfriend for the last fifteen years). But here I could feel the despair of my marital breakdown and the helplessness of losing my family that had convinced me to risk this journey in the first instance. Now two decades later, years of habitual desire to head into the light of my own volition, was pulling me in. ..And now I knew exactly where I was heading. When I was thinking how best to describe passing through the light, I kept wanting to liken it to ‘…being lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages…’(in a nod to ‘Irwin Allen’s mid-1960’s American sci-fi series ‘The Time Tunnel’). But in truth it felt more like being consumed by an all-encompassing tunnel of brilliant white light. It was certainly intense but it didn’t burn, and as it washed over me, I felt my ‘body’ (and mind) emerge from the other side still intact. As the bright light around me fizzled away, I now found myself standing at the steps of a huge stone edifice. Here, the sky was grey, and a menacing wind whistled around me. The whole atmosphere felt somewhat less comfortable than it had before. Climbing the steps towards the entrance, I made my way past some ornate grey pillars that supported an enormous porch which now sheltered me from the inclement weather. There, in front of me – the way in. An archway as high as a London bus, sealed by two huge ‘oak panel’ doors that were embellished with a black iron grid. I grabbed the heavy round handle of the right-hand door and pushed. As I did so, it opened effortlessly and without a sound. I stepped inside.
I was in a monumental library, and it appeared, at first glance, to be completely empty. Thousands of books, but nobody browsing and nobody reading. To my right, row upon row of books sat motionless in aisles that appeared to fade into the distance. Before me, what I could only describe as a strange box-like structure surrounded by tall wooden bookshelves that were filled with various different volumes of hardbacks. Above, two huge brass chandeliers hung either side of this central structure, and as I made my way across the highly polished marble floor, I heard a creak and an echoed clunk as the huge door shut closed behind me. I stopped dead. Where there was silence but a few seconds ago, now my hearing became attuned to the slightest sounds. The wind rattling a window high above me, the sound of my breath as I stopped and looked over my shoulder to get my bearings. I had come in through what appeared to be a side door, and I knew where I should be heading. This vast library was starting to feel a bit like a mausoleum. As I began to walk again, I picked up my pace, turning left towards an open space that resembled the chancel of a large church. In front of it, however, was no alter, but an old oak mezzanine around which even more books were shelved. With my left hand on the bannister, I climbed the large wooden stairs leading up the centre of this raised area, feeling them creak beneath my feet as I headed towards my intended destination. A book – The Book.
Once up on the mezzanine, I turned to my left, towards the only book in this entire dreamed library that held my curiosity. It was as if it had been there waiting specifically for me. There it was, sitting closed on a slightly angled plinth that had been raised on a single-step platform. Briefly gazing out onto the huge library below, I climbed the step and stood in front of the large closed book whose dark bound cover I was about to open. I now looked down upon it. There were no words, but I knew exactly what to expect. I had been here many times before.
Opening the dark brown hardback cover, I gazed at the wispy hologram that immediately rose from the inside pages. Its presence was very difficult to describe. It appeared like a mist of different coloured vapours filled with ephemeral images that slowly swirled around before me. However, unlike the ‘contents map’ that I subconsciously created in its image, what was now playing out in front of me had no words. There were no ‘chapter titles’ to focus my mind. Rather this mesmerising holographic cloud appeared to sink in to the open pages, drawing my attention ever closer to the book in front of me.
I pulled my head back and snapped out of the daze. I needed to reaffirm what was going on – ‘I am still dreaming and I am still awake’. Now I could gauge my situation, and I became completely aware of my predicament. Okay, what I remember is coming to this library – the library in my mind – on many occasions. Each time I would be drawn towards this book, and whatever chapter I happened to be writing at the time would determine my line of enquiry when I opened it. To revisit historic events and experience them for myself, all I had to do was lean forward and let the colourful mist wash over me. When I did this, I would be transported to an ephemeral memory of the reality that had once occurred. Indeed, I realised that many of the events that I had revisited had literally changed the course of human history. Yet, whilst I could never clearly remember reliving my dreamed encounters, I would wake up the following morning instinctively knowing who and what I needed to research to complete the chapter that I was writing at the time. And so, over the course of several decades I documented the imagery that I had witnessed in my dreams; formatting it as a narrated documentary that would define my waking version of The Book.
Every time I had come here previously, I knew exactly what I wanted to investigate. This time however, it felt different. Sure, there was far more yet to discover, but I had completed the chapters that I had set out to evince in my limited ‘waking version’ of The Book, and I no longer wished to immerse myself in the ‘pool of memories’ that appeared before me. The trouble was that, whilst I would eventually come around in the morning having little recollection of my dreamed encounters, at least I could return to the comfortable world of waking reality. My life was, after all, in the physical world. Now however, I realised that if I didn’t actually enter the holographic contents map, I could be stuck here in this empty dreamed library for good because I knew I could not return the way I had come! Entering The Book was my only way out of here.
I couldn’t quite believe how easily the solution came to me. Falling forward into the colourful hologram as I had done on so many occasions, this time I didn’t focus on a chapter that I was attempting to write. Instead, I fixed my mind on trying to remember this whole dreamed experience upon my reawakening. It worked (as far as I know this is the waking world) …and here I am, typing it all up on my desktop!
Since having that particular dream (that began with the cottage on the rolling meadow), I have recognised at least three other ‘gateway’ dreams from which I have made my way to the grand library and immersed my sleeping mind in The Book and its alluring content. In each one, I emerge from a threatening situation (or at least that is when I appear to achieve lucid awareness). In two of the dreams I recall being chased by unnatural or alien entities (either in the cavernous basement of an old theatre or in and out the elevators of an unfeasibly tall skyscraper). In another such dream I am faced with a ‘dark presence’ in the corner of the attic of an old 16th century West Country pub that I lived in during the early 1980’s. Like before, confronting the initial fear in the knowledge that I was dreaming, enabled me to awaken within the dream and find a portal to the library that housed the great book that I was so eager to indulge.
Intentions, Improvements, Plan & Vision
It is quite possible that my stubborn character is what kept me going over the years, preventing me from giving up on completing The Book. Starting with an old HP desktop running on Windows 95 and ending with a 2021 iMac, it has taken no less than five computers to see through the completion of The Book (thus far). The entire narration was actually written in Schwarzwald typeface using Lotus WordPro 98 which, having been pretty much obsolete for years, required me to partition the hard drives of my later computers to access it through an older version of Windows (rather than update or change the actual program). Again, a sign of stubbornness. It was not until 2020 that I actually started to edit The Book and build a table of contents for each chapter, converting the old files to Microsoft Word and Apple Pages as I did so. For the Pages version, I altered the main font from Schwarzwald to Times New Roman for an easier read (on the advice of my long-suffering partner) before converting and consolidating it as a single PDF file. From here I could start to link the chapters together and make the whole thing easier to navigate. A little over three years after finishing the last section, The Book as of 20th April 2023, has ended up as you see it now …but it is still far from its final incarnation as the fully interactive e-book that I had originally envisioned.
When I started writing The Book as a naïve 34 year-old, I did so in the belief that it would take me a couple of years to complete and present in such a way that any prospective publisher could see its potential. I somehow perceived of the final version attaining a cult appeal, particularly amongst young Americans who had tired of Christian authority, and wanted something tangible (a rival book?) to assert the realities of their senses as opposed to the supernatural claims of the Bible. Although I always envisioned The Book as a fully interactive, CGI animated e-book, I was never under the illusion that I had the necessary skills to complete it. So, along with the narrated chapters, I started to write an accompanying ‘animation script’ in which I described how I saw the animation unfolding. It was my intention to link these animation scripts (complete with relevant still images) as a way to guide any prospective animator. However, realising the sheer size of the task I was taking on, I only did this for a handful of sections, and I haven’t included them in this version.
Being aware that, during my writing of The Book, I was subconsciously driven by forgotten dreams, I now realise that these animation scripts were effectively fragments of dreamed scenarios that I had experienced in my transient version of it. Unlike a vast majority of dreamed experiences however, the animation scripts represent a passive ‘third-party’ perspective of the unfolding events. It is my intention, now that I have distributed the full original version of The Book amongst close friends and confidants and released this initial web version, to illustrate and include the animation scripts in the next version by adding clickable links back and forth at every relevant ‘section’ (**********) and ‘pause-break’ (*). It is clearly a mammoth task to animate every single chapter, so I invite any keen animator , if they like a challenge, to have a go at creating their own accompanying visuals for any part of the narration they so wish, and I would be happy to consider it for any subsequent versions of The Book (with appropriate credit, of course).
Other short-term improvements to this early version that I intend to make include the following;
* Increasing the number of links between related sections. There are numerous sections that touch on similar topics or subject matter. It is my intention to create a vast web of links that would allow a ‘reader’ to venture in any direction that they wished when browsing The Book. Initially these will appear as pop-up boxes at every section and pause-break, each of which would contain up to five or six links to other, related sections. In the completed version of The Book that I originally perceived, the pause breaks (*) represent a ten second pause in the animation. This is when the option to click a related link would appear (as well as at the end of each completed section).
* As well as creating links to the accompanying animation script and related topics, I am also looking to record my own narrated version of each chapter of The Book. I intend to set my voice to some ambient background music, and time the narration in order to make it easier to edit any perspective animation accordingly. This too will be available by clicking a ‘voice’ icon that will appear at the start of every section/pause-break. Doing this will effectively turn the incumbent version of The Book into a hybrid audio book.
* Another task that I have set myself on the road to improving The Book is to link the names of everyone who appears in the ‘People’ column of the ‘table of contents’ to their Wikipedia page if they have one (or relevant web page if they don’t). This too is a huge task considering the amount of people that have been mentioned. However, I feel that it is the least I could do as their presence will have permeated my dreams and without them, The Book could never have been written at all. [I am pleased to confirm that this feature is now available on the free The Book of Logical Futures narrative that appears on this website.] 🙂
Not being a scientific paper purporting to declare everything within its pages as factual (outside of a sleeping perception of reality), I feel that I am under no requirement to include citations as evidence for claims within The Book. I have no need of peer review. Yet I have seen countless people in my dreams, and whilst many faces may appear recognisable, any research that I subsequently carried out, only sought to confirm the relevant names, years and places pertaining to the events that I witnessed. I had already decided the sequence of unfolding events (within the confines of each chapter) and their relationship with one another, having been unconsciously directed in my dreams. This is illustrated well by the fact that the very first narratives that I started when I took on this project (as a novice writer and unwitting lucid dreamer) were far shorter and much more vague than those of later chapters. When you also consider that my dreamed visions relied on the pooled memories of a ‘collective unconscious’, the books of The Book of Universal Dimensions and The Book of Organic Evolution are largely set before any human being existed, and therefore rely on the imagination of someone (me) who has not directly witnessed the events and has no scientific pedigree to explain the marvels of what they see before them. As a result, in these early narratives of The Book, I tend to describe what I believe I saw unfolding in front of me given my limited scientific knowledge but acute perception of how logic pays out within our macroscopic reality. As I started to transcribe the books of The Book of Human Experience and The Book of Logical Futures however, my attention to detail had begun to increase, which is reflected in the length and proliferation of sub-chapters, sections and ‘pause-breaks’ in these later narratives. By the time that I had reached the culminate chapter, my confidence as a writer had grown considerably, and I felt better able to convey my unconscious interpretation of human reality in this unique imaginary book. Indeed, it is the only interactive ebook that attempts to behold our collective realities, not just from the past and the present, but also those yet to come.
So there it is – this truly is the stuff of dreams. What’s more, I guarantee that not a single sentence was produced by a chatbot or other form of generative AI. Indeed what you have before you is 100% humanmade (except for, maybe the earlier image of the dreamed library!). I hope that somewhere within this book, you will find something of interest that may change your perception of the world around you for the better. May humanity survive its worst excesses, and may the Earth survive humanity.
For
Molly
…and a very, very special thank you to Lulu, without whose love and patience I could never have completed this project (or at least gotten as far as this!)